As digital cameras and video cameras become widely available, more and more pictures and videos are captured at home. Typical individually owned mobile phones and smartphones have an image capturing function, which leads to an increase in opportunities to store pictures and moving images of usual-day events.
A large number of digital cameras and smartphones have a face recognition technology that recognizes a person photographed in an image. Typical personal computers have a function to collectively manage stored image data for each photographed object.
For example, a user uses these functions to pick up a picture in which, for example, the face of a child is nicely photographed, from among pictures in each of which an image of the child is recognized, and produce an album as a growth record. In this case, the user needs to select a desired picture from among a huge number of pictures, which puts a large work load on the user.
A recent known technique produces an album with a simple operation by classifying a picture in which a person is photographed into an event based on its image capturing date and image capturing place, and displaying pictures of the classified event together with an image being displayed. Another known technique produces an album by acquiring images from an image database and arranging them in a selected album template. Still another known technique automatically generates an album by classifying each picture into an event based on, for example, its image capturing time and image capturing place, and allocating the classified event picture to each page. Conventional technologies are described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-259064, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2007-249434, and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-295890, for example.
However, the above-described techniques produce an album using pictures related to events, and thus the album includes a small number of pictures captured on usual days other than the events.
For example, when an album is produced as a growth record of a child, such an album includes a large number of pictures captured at events such as his or her birthday, New Year, the close of winter, and Christmas, but includes no pictures captured on usual days at a park and an amusement park. The album produced in this manner is not a growth record of the child but is merely an event record. As described above, the above-described techniques produce an album biased toward events and thus having a large information bias.